AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

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mountainFrugal
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by mountainFrugal »

You should totally make indie comics regardless if you leave your job. The world needs more creative expression!

AxelHeyst
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by AxelHeyst »

Whoa! That's awesome!

And I think that's a perfect illustration (forgive the pun :P ) of the magic of ERE where it frees you to try things and do what you want. If writing and lettering comic books is something that you enjoy doing, and might even do for free if you didn't have to hustle for beer money, then the fact that people will actually pay you to do it is an added bonus. Between your stash and whatever income you can make doing stuff you want to be doing anyways, all of a sudden your life is better and you basically don't have to think about money at all. It's irrelevant / on tap.

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

Thanks guys! I've decided to work on the comic stuff as a hobby for now because it is at least one thing that motivates me. I will say, a part of my mind keeps telling me, "who are you to write a comic? Aren't there enough comics out there? This is a waste of your time." But I keep telling that part of my mind to shut up. It's making me more aware at how easy it is for me to talk myself out of things when other people with perhaps even less skill than I have don't do that, and so they end up going further.

Anyway, I'm going to get paid $50/page for (hopefully) 22 pages. The comic is being launched on Indiegogo, and if that's a success, maybe there will be more issues. This would average about ~$1k a month if everything works out, which isn't bad at all. Assuming I can get my expenses low enough, that would be enough to quit my day job. :lol:

Net worth
I recalculated my net worth today, and it came out to $572k. Assuming the 4% rule, this is roughly $23k a year. I haven't been tracking my expenses lately (gonna start again in June), but living under $2k/mo seems more than achievable. So I guess this means I'm technically FI? I haven't really thought about that so it seems strange to think about. Most of my net worth is tied up in 401K/home equity, so it's not easy for me to get. The market also seems completely insane right now, so I don't know how much I trust the 4% rule.

My plan was always to reach FI but then not touch the money until I was truly old and retirement-aged. Instead, I could get my expenses low enough then make money doing other things (freelance comic art, teaching college classes, whatever). If I sold the condo and escaped the expensive Denver-metro-area, I could buy a house with cash and then my expenses would be very low. I could do this tomorrow if I wanted to. So I guess I really am already free and just haven't thought about it.

I don't know yet if I'm ready to quit my career, but I also don't know if that's just the salaryman mindset talking. My job isn't bad, but software development is so tremendously unfulfilling that I've felt very stuck since 2017. I was trying to work yesterday, and the amount I Do Not Care about fixing the selenium automated testing framework is so high that it cannot be described. I simply cannot fathom how anyone cares about the microservices architecture, and then I feel like a failure because I could not bring myself to care about this even if my life depended on it. So this is clearly a problem. I either need to find a way to care about work (at least to the level I'm able to actually make myself do it) or just quit and walk away. It's very hard to walk away from my high salary ($135k), but I suppose this is the salaryman trap.

ertyu
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by ertyu »

AnalyticalEngine wrote:
Sat May 29, 2021 9:07 am
"who are you to write a comic?
You're a guy who would find it enjoyable to write a comic ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Aren't there enough comics out there?
What does the amount of comics out there have to do with whether or not you would enjoy making a comic
This is a waste of your time."
According to whose criteria? The guys who say that one should produce only scarce stuff that one has to be paid fo-- oh wait.

If it's a thing that sparks joy, do the thing. You're not committing for life, it's not obligatory to make sure the decision is 100% rationally justified, all Ts crossed, all potential holes plugged. You can write comics for now, and if you find that you no longer enjoy writing comics and there is something else that would make sense, you can do that. In the meantime, you can do what sparks joy, bask in it, and let serendipity do its work :muscle:

zbigi
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by zbigi »

AnalyticalEngine wrote:
Sat May 29, 2021 9:07 am
My job isn't bad, but software development is so tremendously unfulfilling that I've felt very stuck since 2017. I was trying to work yesterday, and the amount I Do Not Care about fixing the selenium automated testing framework is so high that it cannot be described. I simply cannot fathom how anyone cares about the microservices architecture, and then I feel like a failure because I could not bring myself to care about this even if my life depended on it.
Don't be hard on yourself because of this. I personally find both modern web development practices and microservices an absolute dross - in most cases they're an just overegineering wankery. Any sane person _should_ feel demotivated when having to work with them.

I've recently quit my job to not have to deal with this crap any more and am currently working on projects in the computer vision realm (specifically, I'm working on 3d scanning aka SLAM aka structure from motion aka photogrammetry) which is much more math and intellect-based and basically not prone to stupid fads. Also, it's quite hard and often pays less than web dev, so mediocre greedy careerist (who swarm to webdev and backend development jobs) avoid it like a plague. This should bode well for the quality of my future colleagues, if I choose to find employment in this area.
Last edited by zbigi on Sat May 29, 2021 12:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Lemur
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by Lemur »

Good Journal Topic.

Freedom To is tough to figure out when you're still working a 9-5 job. I took a 6 day work break which has been nice but its impossible to dig into anything for the long-term because its not so much a freedom to...its just a temporary break and wait around period until work starts up again.

I feel like the freedom to will come organically when one quits a job and gets so bored that creativity goes up. Maybe that is what freedom to is - the freedom to be bored and lay around until you figure out something to do.

7WannaBe6 had a good point - think back to when you were a child. I did this a few days ago. I remember never having existential crises or wondering whether my hobby was useful or not. I just did them because I liked them. This included playing video games and programming desktop games. Weightlifting / bodybuilding. I was completely content to just live and not worry about long-term goals, whether I was productive, whether I was contributing to society, etc.

ertyu
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by ertyu »

A common block when people are advised to think back to when they were a child/younger is, "yes but I can't do that any longer" or "I have truly and sincerely grown out of dinosaurs/barbie dolls, I'm not seeing the use." Don't stop there. What did you like about your hobby? For instance with Lemur's example, even if someone for instance was injured and couldn't lift anymore, one would still ask oneself what the "lifting stoke" was all about. Even if you don't want to program silly desktop games now, what was it about programming them then that you found enjoyable? Common things that emerge would be something like, I liked feeling manly, feeling cool because I had this nerdy-cool hobby that allowed me to feel special and smarter compared to my classmates, I liked feeling desirable, I liked picking an interesting problem (how would I make the game do that?) and feeling the accomplishment of figuring out how to solve it, I liked playing and competing with my friends, etc. [Note: I am making these up; I am not implying these motivated Lemur. Rather, these are examples of what a generic person with the same hobby could have been motivated by.] You want to introspect the hell out of these, because while dinosaurs come and go, liking the sense of learning interesting things and feeling cool for knowing them is forever. Or if your grandma indulged you going on and on about dinosaurs, she might not be around anymore, but liking the feeling of someone who cares about you caring to learn about your intellectual interests is forever.

The next step is, of course, to generate ideas about meeting these same goals with new activities and put a couple of those into action.

Another trick is to start out like zbigi: bitch the hell out, in detail, about the things you don't like about your job/didn't like as a child. Why is optimizing the whatever selenium system uninteresting? What about it makes it something you don't care about? Then flip it around. You'll get the qualities of what you would find interesting and meaningful. Watch out for resistance around this step; often there would be limiting beliefs that need to be smoked out that would make the complaining fluent but would make you hold yourself back from accessing and admitting what you would enjoy.

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

On Hyperreality
Jacob wrote:I think not having a TV, or at least not watching it, is a big factor when it comes to choosing unconventional paths. Naturally, there’s this popular idea that TV feeds the masses with certain values, but I believe this is exaggerated. Most programming offers fairly reticent opinions and is quite free of content. The great beauty of TV is therefore not so much that it acts as a form of active propaganda steering people towards certain goals, but that it keeps people from having goals in the first place.
I'm going to dive into Baudrillard here. In Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard coins the concept of hyperreality. Hyperreality is when the fake becomes more real than the real such that the two can no longer be distinguished. An example of this might be Central Park in NYC. When you talk to people about Central Park, how often is their conception of it the real park itself or a representation of the park that they saw in a movie? Most people only know of Central Park from movies. Likewise, if you never saw any movies with the park, you'd have a harder time talking to people about it because most people only know of the fake park. The fake representation of Central Park is more real than the real park itself. Thus Central Park has become a simulacrum, or a copy without an original, and we have entered hyperreality. (Likewise, I believe much of politics and the news is also hyperreality, but I don't want this journal to devolve into politics, so I won't analyze that further)

As I look back on a lot of my life, I think I've been saturated in hyperreality since I was a kid. Granted, we're all stuck in hyperreality to some extent--it's impossible to escape in this culture, although some hyperrealities are better than others. But I've always been into video games, movies, comics, and the types of media you often see fandom grow around. When the Internet came home to me in the 90s, I loved it. I spent a lot of time on computers in middle school and high school because I loved building websites and I loved how cool the Internet was. But the problem with the Internet, video games, media in general is that it's all not real. But it's not fake either. It's hyperreal--it's a replacement of reality.

I think being stuck in hyperreality for so long has stunted my skill development and personal discovery. I'm really feeling this now as I try to massively cut back on screen time and avoid all video games/movies/pointless distractions. It almost feels like an addiction because cutting back on hyperreality has made my depression worse and increased my overall sense of fatigue.

I feel like this is something I have to do though, otherwise I'll never be able to figure freedom-to. I don't want my life to be the default consumer path of being stuck in hyperreality. And in order to get out of hyperreality (or at least as much as one can get out of hyperreality in our postmodern society), I have to eliminate all these distractions and vices that have held me back. It's a lonely path though, and it makes you aware just how much of everything is hyperreality, simulacra, and consumer distractions.

@everyone who replied - thanks for the feedback, I think this is all good advice. I need to spend some time actually thinking about these things and then trying them out too. One mistake that I always make is spending so long on planning and thinking that I never actually do anything. Of course, the only way to learn what works and what doesn't is to do it, but I have to overcome the learned helplessness to make that happen. One step at a time I suppose.

zbigi
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by zbigi »

On avoiding "hyperreality" - I have tried that multiple times, but never lasted. I now tend to think that life in itself is just a bit too boring and spicing it up with movies, youtube, books, internet forums etc. is not that bad (even back in XVIII century, the blacksmiths paid little boys to read books to them while they were working). For me, the key is in moderation and not in total abstinence.
BTW the alternative might be to have a family (kids), which, from what I've seen, can create so much emotions and work and drama that you don't need the artificial enrichment that much.

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

@zbigi - I do think hyperreality is pretty impossible to avoid. For one, where do you draw the line? Mass printed and cheap books are still a fairly recent technology, historically speaking, so does reading count as hyperreality? Audiobooks? Even if I try to avoid all media, basically no one else in society does, which turns you into a social hermit. Case and point: all my coworkers ever who literally cannot fathom how I live life without a Netflix subscription. :lol:

What I think I'm going to try to do for now is limit myself to books, audiobooks, and comic books, as well as massively try to cut back on Internet. This is still hyperreality, but it's less. My prime concern here is having lived experienced reduced to a representation then sold back to me, which is what most entertainment is.

7Wannabe5
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

I think more reality rather than less hyper-reality might be key. Some easy examples would be immersion in nature, volunteering at school in bad part of town, or striking up conversations with attractive others in public settings.

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

Some realizations on salaryman mindset
This journal can get a bit naval-gazey at times, but I hope my experiences can be useful to people stuck in the salaryman mindset like I am.

Anyway, today I came to two realizations about why I am so stuck in my career. The fact is, I could quit. I have enough money to quit. Using the 3% rule, I have a safe withdraw of $1.4k/month. That's enough to live on, especially since I could easily just rent a room out in my house for $600-$700 a month and get moremoney. So really, money is not the problem here. (although, to be fair, I've been lax about spending lately and there is room for improvement here.)

No, the real problem is two other things.

Problem one: Shame and Self-Hatred
I've always had some problems feeling like I fit in anywhere because I am atypical in several ways. I can socialize just fine and people like me, but I've never been "normal" and so I've just gotten good at lying. This has gone on for nearly a decade now and caused me to feel alienated from myself and backfired in several bad habits.

One example is that I hate hate hate HATE dressing in the way that's deemed acceptable for my gender/sex. I had to do this for my sister's wedding and nearly had an emotional breakdown over it. But instead of dressing in the way that I would be most comfortable (ie, a lot more butch/masculine), I've instead settled for "slug style" as a sort of protest against social expectations. But I'm not really happy with slug style. This is just something I do because I feel like no one will like me if I dress how I really want to. So I've ended up in a situation where all my clothes are ugly because I don't want to buy more of them and now I feel weird going out and talking to people because I have nothing good to wear. This has just contributed to isolation, alienation, depression, and more bad habits.

Anyway, I think a similar thing has happened to me with work. I don't really LIKE working in corporate, but working in corporate is seen as normal and good and socially acceptable, so I stay in corporate because I think it will make me normal and then I can be like everyone else instead of being a weirdo.

Of course, the problem with both of these examples is a lot of internalized self-hatred. I think that I am bad because I'm not normal, therefore I have to ignore everything I like/want in the name of trying to force myself to be normal. I've done this for so long that I've learned to accept a chronic state of misery and unfulfillment as the best I can hope for, and therefore I've stopped trying to do anything.

So some of my challenge here is telling myself that the things I want to do are okay and it's okay if I let myself do them. For example, writing a comic script? Instead of thinking about how there's a million other people who want to do that and why do I think I'm worthy of it, I should instead let myself get excited about the story and write the script.

And if I want to quit my job to work on indie comics? Well that's okay too. I shouldn't hate myself for having these hobbies, and I should allow myself to actually do the things I want to.

Problem two: guilt
Related to problem one, problem two is that I feel guilty quitting because my job "isn't that bad" and "I get paid a lot" and "in the grand scheme of things, I should be grateful because this job is cushy and I get paid a lot and I'm not starving in the streets or dying in war or of disease like most humans historically do."

And this is true. I'm incredibly lucky to have even had the opportunity to save so much money in the first place. I'm not saying everything is perfect now, it definitely isn't, but there's also never been a time in human history where more opportunities were more available to more people than right now. Sure, maybe living in feudal Europe as a lord over 100 peasants would be better than working in corporate, but the sad reality is that you probably aren't going to be feudal lord. You were going to be peasant or slave or canon fodder, so all and all, even considering the fact we're facing the end of the world, this is still a hell of a lot better than most of history.

But just because I am lucky doesn't mean that I have to suck it up and just work in this job I hate. If I have the opportunity to pursue self-actualization, then I should.

Getting out of salaryman mindset
So these two realizations are important, and I'm going to spend a lot of time thinking about them and observing when these things trigger behaviors in myself that I don't like or are holding me back. Instead of ignoring everything I want to do like I've done for years, I need to accept myself as not being "normal" and give myself permission to actually start doing the things I want to do. Because really, money is a solved problem here. The real problem is everything else.

ertyu
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by ertyu »

The clothing one is an excellent one to work on because it's a concrete thing. As in, you can make very concrete tasks around it: 1. Choose a set of shoes 2. Wear just shoes somewhere low stakes, then increase the stakes. 3. Plan a coordinated outfit in new style and similarly plan outings or grocery trips (a nice low-stakes one) where you can wear it. Think of it as designing a progressive exposure schedule for yourself.

We have done a lot of hating on social media, but here is one instance where it can be useful. Curating a visual feed with people who confidently strut the style you'd like to be strutting and browsing that for 15-ish mins a day can go a long way towards increasing one's self-confidence.

If there are keystone memories of someone shaming you or making you feel threatened when strutting your desired style, you might want to EMDR those. Unless there is hardcore trauma involved, one can do this at home: think about the earliest instance when you felt something similar, go into the memory, move eyes left to right side to side while you do it. Or spend on a trained professional; I think this particular issue is an excellent one to target with EMDR.

The benefits of working on clothing first is that it's lower stakes than other cases of internalized self-hatred, but results achieved here may generalize and make thornier issues easier. Besides, there is something about having your clothing and environment be congruent with you and your personal values/aesthetics. One of the things that are hardest for me with full time work, for instance, is how depersonalized i feel when i have to constantly sport "corporate wear." I understand how the mere instance of achieving congruence between who you see your true self to be and how that true self appears in the world would bring a lot of peace.

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

@ertyu - That's good advice. I'll give some of those things a try. This issue always trips me up because worrying about individual aesthetic/identity always feels very neoliberal/postmodern/trapped in this particular milieu. Because these things "don't really exist" and weren't luxuries most humans had through most of history, it's always been easy for me to dismiss it.

But if my goal is to find out what I actually like doing and to actually find freedom to/self-actualization, I think I need to come to terms with actually being non-conventional in a very conscious way that normative people may not have to be so intentional about. Ie, if you genuinely enjoy/identify with office culture/office dress, you may never realized the way that these are socially constructed.

I know for me, it's very easy to overintellectualize these things that always just turns into an excuse to do nothing and rot away. Identity may "not really exist," but it's also an important social construct to help us interface with ourselves and other people. And if you're unconventional in some way (or multiple ways), these things always become more difficult to navigate because it becomes a trade off of being true to yourself vs recognizing that appearances do matter. But I've gone on so long with the cynical approach to this that it's really made me lose the ability to relate to myself or other people.

AxelHeyst
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by AxelHeyst »

It’s also interesting to think about how environment relates to the identity/clothing/weirdo issue. You can probably find some location to live where people *will* accept you for how you do want to dress/express yourself, or at least where a visible supportive subculture exists. Spending some time there might help get through initial phases of self confidence building as you’ll get real positive (or at least neutral) feedback on your authentic self expression.

ertyu
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by ertyu »

AnalyticalEngine wrote:
Thu Jun 10, 2021 1:24 pm
@ertyu - That's good advice. I'll give some of those things a try. This issue always trips me up because worrying about individual aesthetic/identity always feels very neoliberal/postmodern/trapped in this particular milieu. Because these things "don't really exist" and weren't luxuries most humans had through most of history, it's always been easy for me to dismiss it.
If things like these didn't matter, prison uniforms wouldn't exist. Maybe not every instance is as dramatic, but there's a reason why some couples wear matching shirts and sports teams wear matching jerseys. There's a signaling and a belonging, a sense of community. For a fan, buying a jersey - or a band t-shirt - is a means of feeling included, of getting closer to an ideal.

On the opposite spectrum, there are also reasons why offices, banks, schools, fast food places, etc. require a uniform. In one's fast food uniform, you are reduced to an extension of corporate. Every time one puts a uniform on, one accepts someone else's power over one: the power of corporate, the power of family expectations as in your wedding example, the power of school and its teachers to discipline you. Conversely, every time you make a choice of your own which is congruent with who you are, you are exercising self-determination.(*) That feeling of "congruent with who I am" is real and specific; there is an integrity and wholeness there. Yes, clothes are "luxuries" and "not real" but we as humans have never in our history failed to make clothing part of our artistic expression. Consider national dress, jewelry artisanship, etcetera. Don't underestimate the power and meaning that can be inherent in clothing.

This power and meaning is precisely what makes it a good starter area to work on: on the one hand, it's easy and achievable and easily tractable by exposure therapy or emdr. On the other hand, the implications and amount of shit packed into clothing can run deep.

(*) consider punks. consider drag queens - "dress to transgress." (to me, being transgender is a separate issue, but going from "the world assigns my gender" to "i tell the world my gender" is another obvious site of power and self-determination).

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

@AxelHeyst - That's definitely true, and it's one reason I need to move somewhere else. Where I live now isn't a bad town by any means, but it's an expensive suburb of Denver where most people just live here to send their kids to an expensive school district. It's definitely not the best for single people in their 30s looking to make friends or get involved in things. So I do plan to rent the condo out and move somewhere else. I will, in theory, be moving to Austin for work in October, but I'm not so sure I love Austin after the traumatic ice storm. :lol: Plus I might quit corporate by then, we'll see. Either way, Austin would be better than where I live now, if only because it's a big city and not a suburb.

@ertyu - That's a good point about uniforms and clothing. It is true that clothing basically exists only to express an image, but what image you are expressing isn't something you can really opt out of. This is again what Baudrillard writes about hyperreality, and gender is definitely an example of it. Because we live in a society of images and representations (and less and less a society of experiences or reality), one can't get out of Plato's cave, not really, because you have to interact with other people at some point. I spent the last ~10 years of my life protesting this by dressing slug style, but the fact is, slug style is still a style, and you're still communicating something to other people with it.

And I've come to terms that I was doing it because I hate dressing feminine but I've had too much fear/internalized shame to dress butch/tomboy/masculine. At the end of the day though, it is just new clothes and a haircut, all of which is fairly easy to reverse if I decide that I don't like that aesthetic.

I suppose it really is a Maslow's hierarchy thing, in a way. Because the further you move up the pyramid, the more time and ability you have to focus on self-expression in unconventional ways or in ways that defy power structures. Freedom-to is therefore higher on the pyramid than freedom-from, and hence why it can be harder to achieve/easier to ignore.

Still, I do think this is an important roadblock because, as an INTJ, I've gotten used to just treating literally everything in my life as painfully instrumental and expecting no personal fulfillment from anything that I do. I'm realizing I need to unlearn this behavior, which is honestly kind of terrifying, but also illuminating of what my preferences are and what my assumptions about the world are.

ertyu
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by ertyu »

Not an intj, so i don't know: would it help to think about how your chosen clothing and presentation style can be instrumental, or do you think that would compound the issue in that you'd rather be moving away from solely instrumental thinking as such?

Also, I know what you mean by slug style is still a style, had a similar realization about social skills the other day. I also get the internalized shame thing. It can attach itself to the weirdest of things -- mine is about getting leaner/fitter, for some reason the idea of consciously working on my health triggers it and holds me back even though I recognize that working on my health will be objectively good for me. I have done the requisite navel-gazing into my family of origin etc and know where the shame comes from, but it's still hard to move against it or dislodge it even though I might intellectually understand it's irrational. The shame has also been there even during periods when I've been no contact with my parents (who are the ones most invested in stoking it and making sure it's alive and well). Dialectical therapy and acceptance and commitment didn't help, I've heard others talk about finding them useful but I was either doing it wrong or those approaches just aren't well-suited to me. They seem to focus on accepting that the shame is there and moving forward with doing the right thing even so, which I'm not too good at. Diy EMDR helped partially; I assume work with an actual professional would work best for me personally, idk about you.

7Wannabe5
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Maybe try to come up with some more adjectives that best describe your preferred aesthetic? For instance, I think of my masculine energy as being more juvenile, like a 12 year old Tom Sawyer looking for fun or freedom from dull convention, so even though I am a 56 years old, I frequently wear overalls and sneakers. I think of my feminine energy as more mature, warm, soft, ripe, so I like silky or cashmere like fabrics with relaxed fit and flow and floral or other natural prints. OTOH, there is zero part of my personality that ever wants to wear a crisp power suit and stiletto heels, lacquered hair, and bright red lipstick like a banker or ballet Mom.

Does Annie Lennox like style maybe appeal to you?

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: AE's Journal Round 5 - Finding Freedom To

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

@7W5 - I've been putting some thought into that lately, as well as looking at how other people around my town dress, and I've come to the conclusion that most people here dress in 'slug.' :lol: Anyway, I think a more sporty look would be appropriate. The key to pulling the sporty look off is also to get into shape, so there's some double motivation lol

On Burnout
This post is some more emotional navel gazing. I know this journal is a lot of emotional navel gazing, but I've gotten to the point where the technical side of this isn't specifically challenging any more. Rather, in order to escape salaryman mindset (and get out of being stuck at WL5), the biggest roadblocks for me are emotional.

A part of achieving self-actualization is being able to recognize your own emotions and then act on them/have the capacity to fulfill them. If you lack the capacity to fulfill your own desires, you can end up in a situation where you always suppress them and therefore lose track of how you actually feel. This is commonly referred to as "being dead inside," or as I like to call it, high functioning depression. It's where you have zero expectation of ever being happy or fulfilled and just go through the motions in life, doing the bare minimum required to fulfill your obligations but never wanting nor expecting more than to merely be left alone.

I've spent the roughly last ~6 years like this during the accumulation phase of my FIRE journey. A part of it was learned helplessness from some previous bad experiences that convinced me that trying was never worth it. Another part of it was the belief that all jobs were exploitative due to power structures/the fact that they pay you less than you make them by definition. And so my plan has been to coast/slug along until I had enough money to FIRE and then I would "live life" or something.

Well, the problem is you can't do something at work without it effecting you outside of work, and in my case, chronically low expectations and slug behavior have lead me to a situation where I struggle to do anything or make any change. A lot of what drives my behavior these days is either boredom or chronic lack of stimulation, which usually manifests in doing a bad job at work followed by [caffeine, internet] addiction.

It's reached crisis levels at this point because it's gotten to where I just cannot, for the life of me, make myself do my job. I will sit down to work, stare at the screen, and just literally CANNOT do anything. This is new for me, as usually I am pretty decent at what I do, and I can usually make myself do anything.

I have written in my journals before about burnout, specifically the kind that Jacob defines here:
Jacob wrote:My particular burnout was caused by having lost faith in the system I was working under. There was really no way to escape that and regain faith by taking time off or finding a hobby, etc. I found that it just got worse and worse and eventually it was hard to drive myself to think about work when I'd rather be thinking about something else. It was time to get out.

I think FI can be an obstacle to overall happiness in that regard. Golden handcuffs are no fun, especially not the self-imposed FI kind in which the argument is "just 3 more years".

We hang onto the known factors and plans because of fear of uncertainty thinking that something else won't materialize. Yet some consider having a mere two years of savings enough to completely rediscover their spirit and change course. In reality, it probably is.
Jacob wrote:Good distinction between burnout and exhaustion. Especially because I found most writings dealing with exhaustion instead of burnout. Exhaustion can certainly be fixed with more sleep, exercise, vacations, dialing back, ... burnout is more of a terminal psychological condition.

Exhaustion: You've been praying too much to the gods of work. Take a break!
Burnout: You've lost faith in the gods of work. Find another religion? Become an atheist? Stop questioning before it's too late?
Jacob wrote:2) Provided one survives that, the second problem is reaching a state of been there done that ... for far too long. One day one wakes up are realizes "I've done everything there is to do in this business. What's the point of repeating myself? I should start doing something else". Once this becomes the primary mantra, again it becomes hard to motivative oneself to stick with it.

...

The macrorisk is that you can burnout to such a degree in one area that it makes it hard to desire to even try something else... because a "that'll probably suck too" attitude has developed.
"because a "that'll probably suck too" attitude has developed."

Oops :? :oops:

Anyway, frankly, I think the most practical solution to this problem is for me to quit my job and try to take some time to figure out what it is that I want out of life. I'm not getting any younger, and I'm not getting my 20s back from the jaws of the cult of work. The only thing I can do now is not waste my 30s in high functioning misery too.

I originally took my current job back in Feb because this job is going to require that I relocate to Austin in October. I thought it was a good way to force myself to move, which is something I desperately need to do anyway. And this current job is by no means uniquely bad. My boss is okay, my team is okay, but I just cannot care about anything any more on a clinical level. I can't care about work, I can't care about my personal life. I can't care about anything.

I don't particularly want to move to Austin. Austin itself seems like a decent city, but Texas cannot manage a power grid to save its life, and that area isn't that great from a climate change perspective. The area in Austin where this job is located is just more corporate MegaPark, which isn't that different than where I live now, and I know that area would just encourage me to spend more money due to the existence of fancy bars and nothing else.

So I think what I am going to do is try to hang in there until October and then quit in October. This isn't overly great from a networking and resume perspective to quit this new job after ~8 months, but I just don't think I can make it any other way. And telling them that I'm quitting because I've just decided I don't want to move after all is a fairly clean reason to quit without anything else lined up. At that point, I can take a break and really try to rediscover my ability to feel any emotion.

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